Difference: Reading with Barbara Johnson

This special issue of differences celebrates the work of the contemporary feminist literary critic and theorist Barbara Johnson, whose work has been revolutionary in foregrounding concepts of difference. Johnson’s is a unique method of literary reading in which literature becomes, in her words, a mode of cultural work, the work of giving-to-read those impossible contradictions that cannot yet be spoken. The contributors to this issue recognize that one of Johnson’s primary gifts to literary studies is her ability to teach theoretical insights, not in a pedagogically prescriptive or didactic way, but through her exquisitely close readings of texts that illustrate the force of theory and language in practice. The first half of the issue comprises essays in which scholars influenced by Johnson offer close readings of texts ranging from Sandra Cisneros’s Carmelo to Edith Wharton’s Roman Fever to George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. Each of the remaining essays is marked by the intimate voice of its author offering a reflective tribute to Johnson’s thought and teaching. Contributors. Lauren Berlant, Rachel Bowlby, Bill Brown, Mary Wilson Carpenter, Pamela Caughie, Lee Edelman, Jane Gallop, Bill Johnson Gonzalez, Deborah Jenson, Lili Porten, Avital Ronell, Mary Helen Washington